“A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked…”
“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age…”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom…”
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic…”
“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living…”
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself…”
“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.”
“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish it’s source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. “
“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. “
“The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. “
“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. “
“We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely … When I don’t write, feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.” (‘The New Woman’, 1974)
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I don’t remember a lot of things; usually I cannot help but be clutched by the whittling hands of life. Sometimes when I sit perfectly still and trick myself into a soft slumber, my dreams swiftly manage to escort me away from my weary life to places where the memories that I can never grasp are born. In my dreams I may visit a lush though over growing garden, deep in the crevices of May. The amber sun bores heartily on my back as I explore the garden. I lean over the harlequin grass to move the messy thorns with such care not to harm myself, I spy an object of such beauty that not even the garden’s excitements could not compare. As a larger quantity of thorn-ridden branches fall clumsily to the grass, something amidst the tiny alcove where the thorns were sparkles.
From Within 